Articles: door hangers

A door hanger has one quality other printed materials lack: it goes exactly where it needs to work and it stays there. In a hotel it hangs on the handle for the whole stay, in a clinic it says the room is occupied, and delivered around a neighbourhood it reaches doors that no letterbox stands in front of.

Two sides, two jobs

The most common mistake is treating a hanger like a small poster and printing the same thing on both sides. Each side is seen in a different moment. One carries the message the guest hung it for; the other can work for the brand or point to something else you offer.

Shape and the hole

A hanger is cut to shape, so the file is prepared differently from an ordinary flyer. The outline and the handle hole are vector lines on their own layer, and the artwork itself goes in a separate file. The details are in our file preparation guide.

• Read at arm length - a hanger is read close up but in passing, so one message beats five.
• Durability - print that hangs for weeks and gets handled survives better on heavier stock.
• A second language - where guests come from abroad, an icon often reads better than a sentence.
• Consistency - a hanger looks best as part of the same set as the menu card and the key card sleeve.